March 29, 2007

To wind up our column on women’s history, here are two forthcoming biographies on influential women from MIT Press:

Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA is the story of one of the most prominent female molecular biologists, Elizabeth Blackburn, who is known for her progressive and essential research into telomeres, the specialized ends of chromosomes, and telomerase, the enzyme that extends them. Author Catherine Brady delves into Blackburn’s fight for respect in a male dominated field of research and mentorship of other women, while exploring the conflict between pure and applied science.

Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle explores this ground-breaking performance and the artist behind it’s transformative choreography. Author Catherine Wood explains how Rainer’s “ordinary” dance and choreography in her performance piece, The Mind is a Muscle, attempted to present the dancer on her own terms, rather than through the gestural conventions of traditional dance or theater. Against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Wood examines Rainer’s choice to express her personal and political views through live form and its impact on the art world. And if you can't wait for this one to come out in October, we do have Rainer's own gossipy Feelings Are Facts to tide you over.

March 28, 2007

With predictions that as many as half of the Earth's species will disappear within the next 100 years (see The End of the Wild by Stephen Meyer), it's nice when a new species has been 'discovered'. The clouded leopard of Borneo, according to genetic testing, is a completely new species of cat (see this article at the World Wildlife Fund). At last some good news for biodiversity! Borneo, a large island in southeast Asia, is home to a huge range of unique species, including a large number of highly unusual mammals. The MIT Press recently released a richly illustrated book, Wild Borneo, about the wildlife of this island. The book includes a photograph of the newly distinct clouded leopard.

March 27, 2007

How do you improve the usefulness of products? Internal design teams? Focus groups? Nope. According to an article in Sunday’s New York Times, you should let citizens of Denmark try the products out and suggest improvements. In the article, Michael Fitzgerald tells that the government of Denmark has established the idea of user-driven innovation as a policy which allows their citizens to test products and make suggestions for how they could be improved upon and has also helped the small nation become more competitive in today’s global economy.

Now, we’ve been talking about user-driven innovation for some time, as our own Eric von Hippel is a huge advocate of user-centered innovation (here, here, and here). And he's the author of a book on the subject, Democratizing Innovation. Much of what he is talking about is being tested in Denmark. von Hippel has talked about the Danish company, Lego, for years as an organization famous for tapping consumer ideas for new products (here). And here's a little from the article about how citizen product design is working in Denmark:

Denmark may be the perfect testing ground for citizen product design, says Christopher Lettl, who six months ago left his native Germany to become professor of user-driven innovation at the University of Aarhus School of Business in Denmark. He thinks that Danish culture’s focus on the concept of “janteloven,” which holds that no person is better than another, may make companies more open to ideas from their users. The Danish company Lego is famous for tapping customers to help develop its Mindstorms NXT robotics kit.

Skeptics argue that Denmark is both small — population, 5.4 million — and a backwater of innovation, and thus has little to lose in trying something new. They might also point out that even in Denmark, Mr. von Hippel’s ideas are up against more conventional forms of user-aided design, such as sending anthropologists to study how people use products in their daily lives. Companies then translate their research into new designs.

Even some of Mr. von Hippel’s acolytes remain cautious. “A lot of this is still in the category of, ‘You could imagine this working out really well,’ ” says Saul T. Griffith, who as an M.I.T. engineering student was part of a group of kite-surfers who developed products for their sport that have since become commercialized. Mr. von Hippel wrote about Mr. Griffith in his 2005 book, “Democratizing Innovation.”

Still, Mr. Griffith can cite a long tradition of user design. One of his favorite examples comes from the title article in Tom Wolfe’s 1965 book, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” which chronicled car customizers whose innovations — tailfins, double headlights, low-slung bodies — were later adopted by Detroit. Mr. Griffith says that even now, millions of people modify their cars, far more people than the world’s automakers could ever employ in research and development.

There is currently no effective way for companies to harness the ideas of those millions. But the Web — itself created by Tim Berners-Lee, an Internet user looking to do something new — seems to offer an excellent potential idea-gatherer. Mr. Griffith’s industrial design firm, Squid Labs, last year spun off a do-it-yourself community site on the Web called the Instructables, which features items as diverse as the Minty Boost iPod power source, dachshund wheelchairs and guns made entirely of K’nex toys, along with detailed instructions on how to build them. The Instructables intends to offer software to companies that want to build communities of citizen product developers.

Mr. von Hippel, who has spent 30 years waiting for his ideas to take hold, says that as user communities like the Instructables spread, they will dominate innovation. He calls them “the dark matter of innovation.”

User-driven innovation may still be in its infancy, but it is clear that companies should keep an eye open to whether something is rosy in the state of Denmark.

March 22, 2007

This year has produced two major books on women in the art
world. Women Artists at the Millennium
takes at look at the results of the poignant question
posed by Linda Nochlin’s in her 1971 Art
News essay: "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" In the
35 years since, the woman’s movement completed reshaped the way we think about women
in the arts, with the development of feminist art and art-history. This collection
reconsiders the idea of women artists in the light of these changes and in the
new millennium.

“Now, more than ever, we need to be
aware not only of our achieements but of the dangers and difficulties lying in
the future. We will need all our wit and courage to make sure that women’s
voices are heard, their work seen and written about. That is our task for the
future.”

-from Linda Nochlin’s “‘Why Have There
Been No Great Women Artists?’ Thirty Years After” from Women Artists at the Millenium, ed. by Carol Armstrong and
Catherine de Zegher

WACK!
takes an in-depth look at the beginnings of the feminist art movement and it’s
revolutionary impact on the art world. Full of biographies on over 120 artists,
and over 400 color images of a wide-range of art mediums, from sculpture to
painting to video, paired with essays on the practice of feminist art by
leading art historians, WACK!is a powerful
examination and visual exploration of feminist art between 1965 and the 1980s. The
publication of WACK! coincides with
the opening of the WACK! exhbition at
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles, CA from March 4-July 16, 2007.

“My ambition for ‘WACK!’ is to make the
case that feminism’s impact on art of the 1970’s constitutes the most
influential international “movement” of any during the postwar period—in spite
or perhaps because of the fact that it seldom cohered, formally or critically,
into a movement the way the Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, or even Fluxus
did. For that reason, I want to invoke bell hooks’s proposal to resignify the
term “feminist movement,” to deliver it from it’s nomenclatorial fixity and
reconnect it to the word “to move”00with all the restless possibility that word
connotes.”

--The MIT Press recently released WACK!, a companion book to an exhibition about art and the feminist revolution at MOCA in Los Angeles. The cover design, a collage by artist Martha Rosler (Decoys and Disruptions), features some female nudity (okay, a lot of female nudity..), and has been met with some powerful reactions, both positive and negative. Read these reactions at the WACK! website, and feel free to add your opinion.

--Finally, on an unrelated note, JetBlue Airline's recent travails provoked this thoughtful essay from Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Vice-President of technical strategy and innovation at IBM. He discusses what might happen to businesses during critical disruptions, and invokes The Resilient Enterprise as a guide to preparing businesses for unexpected problems.

March 16, 2007

St. Patrick’s Day means the
prevalence of the color green—green hats, green bagels, even green beer. MIT
Press has also been going “green” in recent years, publishing a long and
influential list of books focused on the environment, green technologies, and
environmental policy. So raise a toast and raise awareness with some of these
titles:

A group of MIT students have won the mtvU/GE Ecoimagination Challenge, a national competition among college students to develop innovative ways to green their campus.

The winning team, Biodiesel@MIT, made up of about 20 students and administrators, proposes to install a processor to convert used vegetable oil from campus dining halls to a bio-derived fuel called B20. This fuel will then be used to power the many university buses that currently use diesel gas and must go off campus to fuel up. To top it off the group also plans to power the processing facility with solar power. Now that’s the spirit of sustainability!

The team will receive a $25,000 grant to be used in developing the facility as well as a free mtvU concert by the group Angels and Airwaves on Earth Day in April 2007.

March 15, 2007

The Secrets of Women
addresses the exploration of female anatomy in Italy towards the end of the Middle
Ages and how it helped to define the cultural and religious perceptions of the
body. Considered both a holy vessel and at the same time, subject to mortal
illness, the human body was in many ways considered a mystery. Through dissections
of women, for purposes such as embalming or caesarean section, a history and
understanding of human anatomy, illness, and reproductive processes was born. Secrets of Women examines the dual concepts
of holiness and female corporeality by following the case studies and stories
of some of the women who were dissected—from the holy body of a revered abbess
to the body of a convicted criminal.

"
This book… argues that
women’s bodies, real and imagined, played a central role in the history of
anatomy during that time. Urgent question about where babies came from and how
they were conceived spurred physicians and surgeons to open human corpses and
to write about them. In the process, what male writers knew as the “secrets of
women” came to symbolize the most difficult intellectual challenges posed by
human bodies: challenges that dissection promised to overcome."

Almost Heaven
looks at another kind of exploration all together, but one that still remains
as mysterious to us today as medical anatomy did to early scientists—the
exploration of space. Kevles gives us an in depth look into the lives of female
astronauts and cosmonauts, their efforts to change the space program against a back
drop of Cold War fears and the women’s movement’s sense of empowerment. Based on interviews and extensive research,
Kevles paints a colorful and detailed history of women’s pursuit of the final
frontier.

"
This book is about
women in space and their struggle, not altogether over, to join on an equal
footing with men in what is perhaps the greatest adventure of our time. Every
one of these women is remarkable, and each has bravely met two challenges—the risk
of space travel and struggle to succeed in what was formerly a man’s world.
Together they have changed the cast of human exploration."